At the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans food was sweetened with honey and manna. Honey is produced by bees and manna, as the Bible relates, is a vegetable, sugary substance found under the bark of certain ash trees in warm regions. Manna is also the name of a sticky substance, or resin, given off by a type of tamarisk shrub when nibbled by insects.

Later man learned to cultivate sugar-cane in Persia. Alexander the Great came across it and this plant soon found its way to Greece and Rome. But sugar was still a great luxury. It was only around the year A.D. 1000 that the Arabs extended the cultivation of sugar-cane along the entire coastal zone of the Mediterranean. Sugar was then brought back to Europe by soldiers returning from the Crusades.